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Author: gdeboer

Those who watched movies in the 80s might recognize the title as a catch phrase from the movie “Short Circuit”, the 1986 film about a robot struck by lightning who sets out to explore the world. In many ways, this is a fitting depiction of my 5th trip to Oliktok Point, which started today (you… Read More

Our final day at Oliktok Point was a fairly quiet one. As the forecast predicted, the winds kicked up to around 20 mph this morning, and didn’t get any better from there. Doug and I made an attempt to get a plane up this morning, but a combination of wind, visibility, and aircraft issues… Read More

Today was a beautiful day on the North Slope! Low clouds formed over Oliktok Point, replacing the clear weather we’d seen yesterday. This set up a very interesting scene, with the clouds supported by an air layer that was not the same one as was being observed at the surface. A perfect reason to deploy some… Read More

When we first arrived at Oliktok a week and a half ago, it was strangely summer-like. No snow, no ice, just bare tundra. However, the last few days have dropped some snow, and last night as we were completing our last flights, things started cooling off. With the clouds disappearing and the sun only… Read More

It was another fantastic day of flights at Oliktok Point! With the weather continuing to provide opportunities for flight, Doug and I took full advantage and completed another six flights. While six flights might not seem like a lot, several of these were starting to push 45 minutes in length. In addition, the rapidly… Read More

Winds were down this morning, as forecast. I have to admit, when I first got outside this morning I wasn’t nearly as excited as I should have been given the low winds. Instead of winds, we had freezing drizzle and fog, and if there is one thing that is harder to fly in than… Read More

Arriving in Northern Alaska in October and not seeing anything white was quite a shock. Having it stay that way for a week was even more amazing. But today we finally started to get a taste of winter, with slightly colder temperatures and snow! To be honest, the team couldn’t be happier to… Read More

Watching the winds this morning was torturous. For the past few days, the forecast has painted today as the day that things would begin to calm down. That was not obvious this morning, as winds were still in the 25+ mph range, with gusts to 45 mph. Was the forecast a bust? It’s quite painful… Read More

The waiting is the hardest part Every day you see one more card You take it on faith, you take it to the heart The waiting is the hardest part Sometimes life imitates music lyrics perfectly. The ones above, from Tom Petty’s “The Waiting” are pretty much spot on for our current situation. The… Read More

The last two days the winds have been blowing at 20-35 mph. The lower end of this range is pretty close to the operational limit of the small aircraft we brought with us, and given it’s very early in the campaign and the forecast continues to promise better weather ahead, we decided to spend yesterday and today… Read More

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Unmanned Aircraft on Alaska’s North Slope, part 3

CIRES scientist Gijs de Boer, who works in NOAA’s Physical Sciences Division, will work with a team of University of Colorado Boulder scientists and engineers at Oliktok Point, Alaska from 10-22 October to deploy the DataHawk unmanned aircraft system (UAS). This UAS was developed and instrumented in collaboration with the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) in CU-Boulder's Aerospace Engineering department, and is being deployed in collaboration with the Integrated Remote and In-Situ Sensing (IRISS) CU "Grand Challenge" effort. The purpose of these flights is to obtain measurements of thermodynamic properties of the lower atmosphere, including information on the exchange of energy between the Earth’s surface and the overlying air during the initial formation of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean. Data collected during these flights will aid in understanding Arctic climate and processes critical to sea ice formation. In addition to the DataHawk activities, CIRES/PSD scientist Matthew Shupe and NCAR scientist Carl Schmitt will deploy instruments on a tethered balloon system operated by the US Department of Energy’s ARM program. And—the team will deploy a turbulence probe developed at the University of Leeds, an ice crystal imager developed at NCAR, and an aerosol spectrometer developed in the NOAA Chemical Sciences Division. These sensors will provide information on the structure of the atmosphere, clouds and precipitation, and the aerosol particles that go into cloud formation. Follow our work, funded by the US Department of Energy and supported by CIRES, NOAA, CU and NCAR, on this blog!